


bacchanalia

by screechfox



Series: Author's Favourites [12]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Dancing, Hand Feeding, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22669291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screechfox/pseuds/screechfox
Summary: In the heart of an impossible forest, Jon tries not to lose himself.
Relationships: Michael/Jonathan Sims
Series: Author's Favourites [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1829980
Comments: 34
Kudos: 205





	bacchanalia

The grapes don’t taste like grapes. It’s all Jon can think about, an intrusive thought sticky-sweet in his brain. They split between his teeth like grapes do, something satisfying to the cold bursting across his tongue, but the flavour isn't right. Spirals burn their way down his throat like the worst kind of alcohol, acidic and tinged with citrus. 

His thoughts scatter under fractal-drunk dizziness whenever he tries to focus on where he is, how he got here, what’s happening to him. He barely knows why he’s making the effort.

Michael giggles and presses another grape to his lips, held delicately between two needle-sharp fingers. There are forest-green vines laced through its hair, twisting and curling nonsensically. 

“Are you enjoying yourself, Archivist?”

Jon tries to remember how to form words, but opening his mouth only allows Michael to place the grape on his tongue. It pushes his jaw closed with a dull click of teeth-on-teeth, keeping its palm in place until he begins to chew. 

“You are the guest of honour, after all.”

Like sleight of hand — but Jon knows better — Michael pulls a piece of paper from nowhere. It waves it in front of his face, but the neat lines of ink don’t cohere into words. The more Jon tries to focus on what it says, the more his thoughts dissolve into meaningless loops of cursive.

“Your invitation,” Michael sing-songs, grinning from ear to ear. It taps a fingertip against the bottom of the page, the only place where the writing so nearly begins to make sense. “And your RSVP was much appreciated.”

Jon wants to protest that whatever is written there, it definitely isn’t his name, but the only objection he can make is a low groan, drawn from his throat like bile. Michael seems to understand, though; its lashes flutter in fake innocence.

“Don’t you recognise yourself?” It erupts into flurries of giggles, and every fractal echo of the sound pierces into Jon’s last shreds of lucidity. “Perhaps you’re finally understanding how pointless it all is, hm?”

It’s not, it’s _not_ — but Jon barely remembers a place and time before this, before finding himself curled and caressed in the uncomfortable angles of Michael’s form.

He blinks hard, hoping desperately to read his own name on that nonsensical piece of paper, but when he opens his eyes, it’s nothing but a flutter of green leaves in Michael’s palm. It winks at him, scattering them to the breeze, then reaches forward, its fingers stroking across Jon’s cheek. It hurts, but the pain is distant, dreamlike, and when Michael leans back again, the blood on its fingers isn’t blood at all, but deep red wine staining that pale skin.

* * *

They’re dancing in the centre of a forest clearing. Light shines down from the sky above, too warm to be moonlight but too gentle to be sunlight. There are other people around them, but none of them matter, all dressed in shades of wine and champagne.

Jon has the distant awareness that his feet are barefoot, and that he’s bleeding onto the soft earth below. Vines curl up from wherever he steps, vicious thorns and hungry flytraps.

Michael is leading the dance — a bastardised version of how Jon imagines the waltz to go. One of its hands is interlaced with Jon’s, drawing blood that isn’t blood, while the other rests against the small of his back, promising pain should Jon stop following its lead.

The rhythm is irregular and unpredictable, never quite what Jon expects. After a while, it starts to feel— not understandable, but like his thoughts are ebbing and flowing in that same pattern.

“How did I get here?” Jon asks. Or, he thinks he asks. It feels like the words get lost on the way from his brain to his mouth, and what spills out might be just as incomprehensible as anything he’s experienced in this strange place with Michael’s arms around him.

“That’s very simple: you walked through a door.”

Humming to itself, Michael spins Jon until he’s breathless, until his eyes go unfocused and he can barely stand. Michael’s grip loosens, and Jon panics, desperate not to fall. When he digs his fingers into the absence of Michael’s physicality, Michael smiles wide and spins him again.

“Doors can go so many places other than corridors, you know.”

Every step sends piercing agony through Jon’s skin. He glances down to see those same vines wrapping around his legs, squeezing so tightly that his feet have gone numb and bloodless. He stumbles and Michael catches him in both arms, pulling him close.

Jon heaves in a breath that doesn’t sit right in his lungs, trying desperately to focus on something that isn’t Michael, isn’t dancing, isn’t the maddening strains of music in the air.

"This is a ritual, isn't it?"

"Oh, of sorts!"

So many questions arise in Jon’s mind at that, twisting into a knot of frantic curiosity. But when he opens his mouth, he doesn’t ask what he expects to.

“How does it end?”

Michael tilts its head like it doesn’t understand the question.

“There’s no end until you lose yourself,” it says, and for the briefest moment, it looks almost sad. “But isn’t this revelry splendid, Archivist?”

“It’s madness,” Jon whispers.

“Well, yes.”

* * *

By the time they settle to rest on the forest floor, Jon’s throat hurts like he’s been screaming. His blood tastes the same as it always has, iron-tang unpleasantness drying on his tongue.

Beside him, Michael hums something tuneless, and Jon can’t help swaying dizzily along.

“I’m killing you, Archivist,” Michael says, gleeful and mournful at the same time, sunlight and moonlight woven together into one shining voice. “I think I might be sorry about that — but the choice is made, isn’t it? You won’t leave my dance the same way you entered it.”

“I thought—” Jon cuts himself off. There are no thoughts here. “Something else was the dancer.”

“I dabble,” Michael informs him, another tinny melody reverberating below its skin. Jon can feel it beneath his own skin too, in the shaking of his hands and the sluggish pulse of his blood.

“Of course you do,” Jon sighs. Exhaustion settles across him like fallen snow. Around them, the forest is blanketed in white, crisp and clear and blinding. “Are you doing this?”

“Doing what? Your madness is your own, I’m afraid.”

Michael grins, teeth as white and sharp as icicles. It reaches out and catches the snow in its hand, weaving it together with its fingers until it holds a shawl of gleaming fractals. It drapes it across Jon’s shoulders without ceremony, and the cold feels blessedly real. He was too warm before, he thinks — must have been, his jumper long-discarded and his shirt half-unbuttoned.

“Why did I come here? What have I forgotten?”

The questions ripple outwards around them both, melting the snow as surely as the summer sun. He feels a peculiar sense of loss as the cold falls away, as Michael’s expression falls flat.

“You’ve forgotten nearly everything, I imagine.” There is a piece of paper in its hands, crumpled and ink-stained. “All you have left is who you are. That’s the one thing you have to give up on your own, or die trying to hold onto it. Either will work well enough for my purposes.”

It holds out the paper, and Jon recognises it as the invitation Michael had taunted him with — hours, days, weeks ago. His name twists and shudders on the page; it’s very hard to remember what those loops of dark ink actually say.

In the distance, there is a sound like laughter, or like crying.

Jon looks up, and he is alone in a forest. There is wine spilled on the floor at his feet, and flickering firefly lights fading into the darkness of the trees. He stands and begins to walk.

* * *

It’s very easy to lose your way in a forest, Jon realises. The trees are tall and solid, the flowers bloom in shades of off-white and rust-red, and the rivers show him a reflection that cannot be his, for the simple fact that it looks different every time.

Sometimes he thinks he sees someone darting through the trees far ahead of him, just as lost and confused as he is. Sometimes he thinks he hears a woman crying, but when he looks around, there is just another pool of water, and an unfamiliar face staring up at him.

“Who are you?” Jon asks, listening to his own voice echoing the question back at him.

Her name is not Helen, because she isn’t real, she tells him. None of this is real.

“I already knew that,” he tells her, and she laughs. That echoes too.

He carries on walking. There are a set of old stone stairs that lead up and up into the sky. No one stands on them and beckons him closer, so he ignores them. He carries on walking.

At some point, standing by another stream, he unrolls the invitation again and finds that it has rearranged itself into something he can only describe as a map — though it bears no resemblance to any map he recalls seeing before. There are entrances everywhere, but not a single exit. He can still see his name, twisting and tangling at the heart of it all. 

“Do you know how to get out?” Jon asks the empty air.

The woman who is not Helen tells him that she escaped once, a long time ago. She met a man who looked like him and talked like him, but since this isn’t real, it couldn’t have been him. They’d spoken, then she’d stepped through the door again and she hasn’t been real since.

She pretended for a while, of course, but then she realised how unreal that pretense was. It wasn’t long after that when she realised that she wasn’t real either, and maybe never had been.

Staring out of the water at him, she looks sad, but at peace with it all.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, and the water ripples with the force of her smile until she vanishes.

Jon is alone. He’s been alone this whole time.

A cold wind blows through the trees as he considers the rest of his options. The sane thing to do would be to give up, go and dance the rest of his days away in delirium. But there are no sane things to do anymore, and Jon is far too stubborn to give in at this point.

He carries on walking.

* * *

There’s a door in front of Jon. He doesn’t like the peeling yellow paint or its creaking hinges. It doesn’t belong in this impossible forest, which of course means that it belongs here perfectly.

“Open it,” Michael says from behind him, “and all this will be over.” The words loop in Jon’s brain like a recording, and he realises how familiar they are, even laced with static and distortion.

“You’ve told me that before,” Jon snaps. “It doesn’t seem to have done me any good.”

Michael leans past him, fingers brushing over the metal of the handle but not closing around it. Jon can feel its body pressed too-light against his back. It wraps its arms around him, pulling him close. He hates to admit it, but it’s a comfort after being alone for so long. 

“I don’t want to let you go,” it admits in a whisper. “I can’t control what happens out there.”

“I’m not sure you control what happens here either.”

Jon feels Michael go still behind him, and then it cackles. Its laughter echoes into his chest until he’s laughing too, vicious and hysterical and not entirely sure what’s going on.

“Will you come back?” Michael asks, plaintive.

Jon remembers dizzying food and maddened revelry, all the things that made it so very hard to think at all. Drunk on Michael, drunk on a world that moulded itself to his doubts.

“No.”

Michael sighs happily, dreamily, and lets him go. Jon turns to face it and its eyes are wet with tears. It leans in close, kissing him with chapped lips that taste of grapes and nothing more.

“Already a liar. You’ll be just fine.”

It laughs again, a giggling hiccup of a thing. When Jon blinks, Michael is gone — but then, it was never there in the first place. There’s a different door in front of him now, dark wood and intricate engravings at the edges that shift every time he blinks. 

Jon drops the map to the floor, failing to notice the way his name has vanished from the centre. But that’s the way it goes: you don’t notice you’ve become someone else until far too late.

The door opens at his touch, and he steps out of the forest.

**Author's Note:**

> i can be found at [screechfoxes](https://screechfoxes.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. have a good day!


End file.
